THE JOY OF SIX: Finals week four

COACH Trent Robinson has admitted he thought it ‘a bit strange’’ that Sydney Roosters chose to promote this season with the slogan “We Play For Premierships”. As part of an extremely bolshy campaign which attracted little media scrutiny, the tricolours even handed out at home games imitation premiership pendants for each of their 12 titles. “I actually just thought about that this morning,” Robinson told me in a pre-match MMM interview. “It was a bit strange. It was a marketing ploy (from) right back before I got here. They decided on it. I thought it was true but I didn’t know if we wanted to sprout it anywhere. “ In an age of even puerile comments, slogans and stories being plastered on opposition dressing room walls, the boasts went through the to keeper – perhaps because they were aimed at the converted, ticketed Roosters fans.

2. BTW SBW MIA? LOL

FACT: Sonny Bill Williams is a rather big time athlete. Fact: Rugby league, outside of NSW and Queensland, is a rather small time sport. Just as getting Williams back in the NRL was seen as some sort of endorsement for how important the NRL was, keeping him seems to be judged as a similar litmus test. But in coming and going as he pleases, he holds a mirror up to us – even if we don’t like what we see. Our World Cup is older than rugby union’s but commercially dwarfed by theirs. It looks like he’d rather box than play in it. Our national teams rarely play. The NRL has limited geographic reach within Australia and New Zealand and nothing more than cult following elsewhere. It looks like he’d rather play in a competition played across three countries. Instead of saying ‘let’s give SBW a fortune and we’ll all feel better’, would we not be better served addressing the shortcomings of our sport?

3. YES, THEM AGAIN

BY fining Geoff Toovey and Ricky Stuart (the second time) this year, the NRL became more draconian over criticism of match officials. By not fining Neil Henry or Johnathan Thurston, they showed new leniency, with the difference being that it’s OK if you were robbed. , but only in cases where you were robbed. That being the case, Toovey should have been allowed to say whatever he liked on Sunday night. The match officials made mistakes – that’s all. But the vast majority of them happened to favour Sydney Roosters. Coaches should be able to say what everyone else sees.

4. SEE MORE BUTTS

“WHAT about the headbutt from that grub!” “We’ll take a penalty for the head-butt thanks”. “OK boys, let’s start headbutting now”. Those were the comments from Manly players to referee Shayne Hayne after Sydney Roosters’ Jared Wearea-Hargreaves led with the head in a clash with Manly’s Justin Horo in Sunday’s grand final. It wasn’t what many of us would regard as a headbutt because it wasn’t cocked, as such. JWH didn’t tilt his head back before lunging with the forehead. But if it wasn’t a head-butt, what was it? We see similar actions every now and then. Perhaps we need the head butt to be more clearly defined. “In the first half when you had that whatever,” Hayne later told Waerea-Hargreaves, “just watch what you do with the head”.

5. WORLD SCHEDULING CHALLENGE

WE were confidently assured mid-year that the World Club Challenge would be in Australia in February and that the previous hodge-podge organisation of the game was a thing of the post. But that announcement will be sorely tested, now that Wigan and Sydney Roosters will be involved. Leeds were the club that pushed for the game to be played Down Under, while big city clubs like Brisbane and Melbourne were the NRL teams seen as being capable of turning a profit. South Sydney were going to take the game to Perth. And the exchange rate has fallen away since the decision was made. Perhaps this could be the year we get the mythical neutral venue in the Middle East or Asia. But DW Stadium, Wigan, must be firming.

6. DOG OF A NIGHT

DERIDING wingers is sometimes a sport within the sport of rugby league. In Sunday’s first game, Winsor Wolves’ Eto Nabuli – the man discovered as a hotel porter by Andrew Johns and Brad Fittler in Fiji – scored his side’s first two tries and his errors gave opponents Cronulla two of theirs’ as well. Similarly, some gaffes from Shark Nathan Stapleton helped Windsor. But some wingers are clearly important – like a Wolf of another variety, Warrington’s Joel Monaghan. When he was carried off with concussion (there’s a photo of his ear flattened like a pancake doing the rounds), his side was leading the Super League grand final at Old Trafford 16-2. Wigan scored within seconds of his slow passage to the sheds on a medicab – and promptly impersonated Manly last week by running up 30 unanswered (and uninterrupted) points.